Explore the Art of Inujima on an Exclusive Guided Half-Day Tour, with Transport by Chartered Boat

Board a Chartered Boat to Sail to Inujima, the Hidden Gem of the Seto Inland Sea’s Art Islands

The small island of Inujima lies just to the north of Naoshima and Teshima in the Seto Inland Sea. With those two islands, it shares the proud artistic legacy created by Benesse Art Site Naoshima, which promoted the creation of art museums and art installations as a means of revitalizing the Setouchi region. Inujima is also part of the Setouchi Triennale, an internationally-renowned art festival that began in 2010. The art found on Inujima reflects the island’s industrial past as well as its unique local culture and traditional architecture, while also provoking viewers to consider questions about the future.

While most visitors use local ferries to travel the Seto Inland Sea, sailings to smaller islands like Inujima are infrequent, especially on days when the museums are closed. That is why this exclusive Wabunka half-day art tour includes transport by chartered boat. From the moment you meet your interpreter-guide at Uno Port or Naoshima and step onboard, you will know that you have made the right decision. Cruising smoothly over the azure waters on your very own boat will put you in just the right mindset to explore the island’s fascinating modern art museums and installations.

Connecting Art with Community, Tradition, and Sustainable Energy on Inujima

Throughout your tour, a knowledgeable interpreter-guide will provide you with background information to enhance your understanding of Inujima and its art, as well as offering translation when you speak to the representative from the Fukutake Foundation while visiting the island’s museum and art installations.

For such a small place, tiny Inujima has made significant contributions to Japanese history, with the high-grade granite of its stone quarries found in the walls of castles in Tokyo, Osaka, and Okayama. As Japan rapidly modernized and industrialized in the nineteenth century, the island also became a center of copper smelting, with its population swelling into the thousands at the peak of its days of stone and copper production.

These days, the island’s residents number less than 40, most of them elderly, who dwell in a single, close-knit village where narrow alleys wind between the houses. Many of these are vacant now, filled with the memories of days past. When the Fukutake Foundation embarked upon construction of a museum and other art installations on Inujima, it aimed to continue in the spirit of its earlier ventures with Benesse Art Site Naoshima with the aim to revitalize local communities through art. Artists and architects focused on restoring and reinterpreting historic buildings to celebrate the Inujima’s industrial past, while looking to the future through recycling and the use of natural energy sources.

Inujima Seirensho Art Museum: Beauty Arises from the Ruins of a Former Copper Refinery

After your boat arrives on Inujima, you and your translator-guide will walk towards the Inujima Seirensho Art Museum, which can be recognized at a distance by its thin brick chimneys, the tallest structures on the island. This is where you will meet the representative from the Fukutake Foundation, who will lead you through the facility and its intriguing artwork.

The museum opened in 2008 within the remaining structures of a former copper refinery, which closed over a century ago. The architecture was designed by architect Hiroshi Sambuichi. Inspired by the refinery’s role in Japan’s impressively-rapid yet at times environmentally-destructive period of industrialization, the museum looks toward a more sustainable future by utilizing environmentally-friendly solar and geothermal heat sources. Inside, artist Yukinori Yanagi has created an expansive work of art that fills much of the museum’s interior, inspiring the viewer to look around and ask provocative questions about where Japan has been and where it is headed.

Touring the museum alone, along with the Fukutake Foundation representative and your translator-guide, gives you time and space to deeply consider the multiple layers of meaning conveyed through the art and architecture here. Historical background coupled with insight into the artist and architect who reimagined this historical structure will add deeper levels of subtext and context to your understanding of the museum and the island.

Inujima “Art House Project” - Reinterpreting a Traditional Island Community with Embedded Art Galleries

Heading into the village, your next exploration on Inujima will revolve around the Inujima “Art House Project”–-an initiative that began in 2010 as a collaboration between artistic director Yuko Hasegawa and architect Kazuyo Sejima. This innovative project makes use of vacant structures and spaces to create thought-provoking galleries and installations, incorporating parts of traditional houses as well as modern materials like acrylic glass and aluminum. Once more, your experience here will be enhanced by the explanations of the representative from the Fukutake Foundation.

Expanded through several years to its current six installations, the Art House Project provides art and architecture that offers fresh perspectives on this island and its people, highlighting the beauty of its past while bringing a fresh new sense of color and vitality. Housed within the structures, you will find intriguing works of art by Japanese, Brazilian, and Danish artists. One particularly evocative installation by artist Yusuke Asai is located on the former site of a stonecutter's house, combining a mosaic-like painting with jagged stone pillars of irregular sizes.

Visiting these art installations accompanied by the representative from the Fukutake Foundation and your translator-guide is the best way to examine each in detail, examining the project’s general interplay between tradition and modernity as well as the ongoing evolution of material culture.

Reflect on Your Intimate Encounter with World-Class Art and Architecture Interwoven into a Small Island Community

Before you depart the island, your translator-guide will take you for a refreshing break at the stylish cafe in the island’s ticket center, where you can enjoy a drink and a snack (additional fees apply, please pay on site). Many of the dishes served at the cafe contain local seasonal ingredients from the Setouchi region. For your visit, this laidback space will be reserved solely for you and your guide making it the perfect time to think back over your tour of the island and reflect.

Watching the waves roll by on your way back to Uno Port or Naoshima, you may think deeply on many things, such as the relationship between the urban and the rural, between places around the world that rise with history and those that fade away. Maybe you will wonder what kind of art installations will be made about our societies and what survives of them in a century’s time. Whether you discuss your thoughts with your guide or choose to keep them to yourself, the value of a day spent pondering these deep questions will stay with you for a long time after you have left the boat and the island behind.